Taxonomy: Sixteen Inches On Center

by Martin Bialecki

ack in the late ‘50’s I was already in deep with nature. I spent my days heaving an old wooden rowboat through the marshes of Iron Creek Mill Pond in quest of turtles. A dozen or so Black terns swooped and shrieked while I was within splashing distance of their nests. Little did I know that my intrusion would be instrumental to their virtual extirpation, that and the men with headlamps in the night hunting bullfrogs. 

At bedtime with a head full of encounters I would drift towards sleep on the cot on the screen porch, the unfinished ceiling exposing 14 parallel compartments — rafters 16 inches on center — I was compelled to fill: 14 birds, that was easy. 14 trees, easy. Flowers, same.

Crepuscular sounds infused the porch. Purple martins, American bittern, whippoorwill, cicada, crickets, Katy-dids, all manner of frogs, the distant bleating of sheep, the evening’s last bucket of water drawn from a squeaking pitcher pump across the lake, my father’s worn oar locks clunking his return after my mother clanked the bell, and the soft slam of the privy door. Back then traffic was so sparse I would rouse myself to see if the car I heard was showing headlights this way along the lake. At the screen mosquitoes whined and June bugs thumped. Smeared with 6/12 I succumbed to sleep knowing voids between rafters I could not fill. I fudged. Moths and butterflies together: 14+. Fish and snakes, even more. Turtles, frogs, and, if I threw in snails, leeches and clams: 14! Like baseball cards I could swap at will, the rafter spaces allowed for a game without limits. Between rafters, certain knots and splits in the roof boards held significances, each correlating to new dimensions in my learning.

But it was the sounds that wouldn’t fit. Unresolved for years, my hold on these voices gradually found answers, like in ‘82 when I learned from a description that the rapid clicking, gone since the early sixties, was not insect but cricket frog. But it was only about twelve years ago that I actually “rediscovered” them at the other end of the lake, behind the island. That was one of my greatest finds against a backdrop of encroaching purple loosestrife, autumn olive, garlic mustard and spotted knapweed.

Tonight I heard the Blanchard’s cricket frog here from the porch — just like ‘62 — the population robust enough to have expanded its range back across the lake, a whole half-mile in about 40 years. Over those years Canada geese, cranes and coyotes, at first absent, became common. Had I only known how much would change! 

I now know many more of the whistles, hisses, trills and cries that fill the night. By day dragonflies elude me while grass ranchers mow the rich silence. And the rafters haven’t budged.

Contents

Design by Kenny King.